ten well, by a person who was engaged in the effort to make it a non-slaveholding state. While I do not entirely concur in this writer's views, I can heartily commend the thoroughness and clearness with which he has described the organization and operations of the "Emigrant Aid Society," which was formed in the Northern States, and which conducted bands of emigrants into Kansas, for the purpose of making it practically certain that it would not become a slave state. It was a force directed and managed with great skill and energy, but a force of the opposite character entered the territory from the opposite section of the Union, and made the contest a struggle for supremacy between Northern and Southern settlers. The struggle lasted for three years, and it ended in the control of the territory by the anti-slavery interest, because the pro-slavery interest, although violent and aggressive, was not so well managed as the affairs of the Emigrant Aid Society. In the course of the struggle it was for a good while doubtful whether mere anarchy would ever be succeeded by a settled condition of public affairs, in which the will of a majority of the people could make itself felt in orderly and lawful methods. If Congress had performed its duty in the act which organized the territory, instead of leaving it to the operation of Mr. Douglas's plan of "popular sovereignty," no such struggle would have taken place. Kansas was composed partly of territory ceded by France to the United States in 1803, and partly of territory ceded by Texas in the settlement of the boundaries in 1850. There was therefore no reason why, in the act organizing the territory of Kansas, the long-settled policy of prohibiting or allowing slavery, according to the circumstances of the case, should not have been continued. The proceedings in Congress, looking to the organization of territorial government for both Kansas and Nebraska, began in 1853 and lasted until May, 1854. The bill which became a law on the 30th of May, 1854, was that in which Mr. Douglas inserted his repeal of the Missouri Compromise restriction, which then applied to the whole region included in Nebraska and Kansas. All that was needful was to leave the restriction untouched; and if thereafter the battle-ground, covering the constitutional power of Congress to impose that restriction, were to be made in the Supreme Court of the United States, there was much less probability of a result against the power than there was after Congress

had repealed the restriction already existing.' Nebraska lay north of Kansas, and being formed out of a part of the territory ceded by France in 1803, and lying north of the parallel of 36° 30', it was subject to the restriction of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. It was organized as a territory by the same Act of May 30, 1854, which organized the territory of Kansas, and which swept away the anti-slavery restriction, but it did not become the scene of such a violent struggle as that which took place in Kansas. If Kansas should become a free state, it was certain that Nebraska could not become a slave-holding state. There was a pro-slavery faction among the settlers in Nebraska, but it was not so large or so aggressive as the same faction in Kansas. An act of Congress to enable the people of Nebraska to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of the state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, was passed April 10,1864, during the first term of Mr. Lincoln's presidency. This act was at first rejected by the people of the territory through the influence of the pro-slavery faction; but afterwards the territorial legislature framed a constitution, which was submitted to the people and was ratified. Under it the territorial legislature applied for the admission of Nebraska into the Union as a state. This Constitution, however, contained provisions unacceptable to Congress as it was then constituted. It was ratified by the people of the territory during the civil war, when the Republican party exercised the whole authority of the Federal Government. A bill for the admission of Nebraska into the Union passed the House January 15, 1867, and passed the Senate with an amendment January 16th. It was vetoed by President Johnson, but notwithstanding the veto it passed the Senate on the 8th of February and passed the House on the 9th. This bill was carried through the two houses because it contained, as a fundamental condition precedent to the admission of the state, that the word "white" should be stricken out of the constitution. This word, if it had remained in the constitution, would have had the effect of confining the elective franchise to white persons alone. It was afterwards certified to the Presi

The writer to whose account of the Kansas struggle, or Kansas crusade, I have referred, is the Hon. Eli Thayer, whose book is quoted above. He does not give the history of Nebraska. His reports and those of the Emigrant Aid Society, which he was so instrumental in organizing, were confined to Kansas.

dent of the United States that the word had been stricken out; and thereupon the president, by the authority conferred upon him by the act, issued his proclamation declaring the state admitted into the Union, March 1, 1867. Kansas was admitted into the Union as a state by a law passed January 29, 1861, after the antislavery settlers had succeeded in making it certain that it would be a free state.

CHAPTER X.

COULD THE CIVIL WAR HAVE BEEN AVOIDED?-ITS TRUE BASIS.OBJECTS FOR WHICH IT COULD BE RIGHTFULLY PROSECUTED.PRESIDENT BUCHANAN'S COURSE IN PREPARING TO ENCOUNTER SECESSION.-NEGLECT OF CONGRESS TO PROVIDE HIM WITH THE NECESSARY MEANS. THE COURSE OF MR. JEFFERSON DAVIS AND OTHER SOUTHERN MEN WHILE THEY REMAINED IN CON

GRESS.

A CALM review of the period over which I have now passed will hardly lead to the conclusion that the civil war was a necessity, if we take into view the causes which brought it about. After it was begun-after the country was divided into hostile sections, and different groups of states, each of which had long possessed an organized government, were led by the Federal Government on the one side, and by the Confederate Government on the other-it was necessary that it should be prosecuted to the end. The issue that was made was on the alleged constitutional right of state secession from the Union, and until this issue had been finally determined by the wager of battle, one way or the other, there could be no peace. In this sense, and for this reason, the war was a necessity. But it is a very different question whether the state of things between the North and the South, which culminated in secession and civil war, could not have been avoided. This state of things was produced by causes which history must analyze, and which were complex and numerous; and while these causes were mainly due to the great fact of slavery, and operated to create a state of feeling in which masses of men and individuals acted with little wisdom, yet there is a question, and a serious one, whether the whole matter of slavery could not have been dealt with by different methods and in a different spirit. It may be said with perfect truth that if the removal of slavery had been approached in the beginning of the

period which is to be described in this chapter, in the way in which it might have been approached, and had been acted on throughout that period by methods that were within the reach of the people of both sections, we might have escaped an assertion of the doctrine of secession, and might have avoided the necessity for a suppression of that doctrine by physical force. But this view of a portion of our national history presupposes that mankind are wiser, more considerate, and less under the dominion of passion and prejudice than they unfortunately often are, especially in free countries, where popular feeling acts directly upon the government, and forces, or seems to force, its way into all measures of legislation and public action. The government of the United States, under the Constitution, was so limited in its powers, in respect to matters that touched the internal policy and condition of the states, that whenever any action in the states was contemplated, it was both in the power and was the duty of that government to abstain from interference with it. But then the gov ernment of the United States has always been a popular one. It has always been liable to be acted on with great force by popular feeling, and hence it may be wrenched out of its appropriate sphere, if those who administer it for the time being are not both firm and intelligent in discriminating between its powers and the rights of local self-government vested in the states. There never was much difficulty in making these necessary discriminations when there was any disposition in any quarter to attack the slavery that existed in the states. But when it came to the expansion of the Union, and questions of organizing new territories to become new states arose, the matter of allowing or prohibiting slavery therein presented a field of public action into which the popular feelings and interests of different sections found their way, because of the conflicting doctrines of Congressional power over the territories which prevailed between the North and the South. If, as I have already pointed out, there had been a firm and consistent adherence to the policy which had been adopted in the earlier days of the republic-a policy by which slavery was allowed in or excluded from particular territories according to circumstances-there would have been no occasion for the assertion of the Northern doctrine that Congress could not constitutionally permit the introduction of slavery into any territory, and